(Vol. v., p. 79.)
Your correspondent will find the ample story in the _Golden Legend_. It
is related more succinctly by Roger of Wendover, who has been followed
by later chroniclers. In the legend, as related by Roger of Wendover,
the murder of Kenelm is said to have been miraculously notified at Rome
by a white dove alighting on the altar of St. Peter's church, bearing a
scroll in her bill, which she let fall. The scroll contained, among
other things, the following lines:
"In Clente cou bache
Kenelm kine-bearn,
Lith under thorne
Havedes bereaved."
"Qui Latine sonat (says the Chronicler) in pastum vaccarum
Kenelmius regis filius jacet sub spina capite privatus."--_MS.
Douce_, fo. 66. _b._
And afterwards he says:
"De hujus quoque sancte martyris quidam sic ait:
In Clent, sub spina, jacet in _convalle bovina_,
Vertice privatus, Kenelmus rege creatus."
"Cou ba_c_he" has been erroneously printed "cou ba_t_he;" and travestied
sometimes into _coubage_.
_Clent_ is the name of the place, a wood according to the _Golden
Legend_. _Bach_, or Bache, is a word that had long escaped the
glossarists, with the exception of Dr. Whitaker, who says it is "a
Mereno-Saxon word, signifying _a bottom_, and that it enters into the
composition of several local names in the midland counties."
The passage in _Piers Ploughman_, upon which this is a gloss, occurs at
p. 119. of Whitaker's edition:
"Ac ther was weye non so wys (that the way thider couthe
Bote blostred forth as bestes) _over baches_ and bulles."
The word occurs several times in _Layamon_, and on two occasions the
later text reads _slade_; in one passage we have it thus:
"Of _dalen_ and of _dunen_
And of _bæcchen_ deopen."
The cognate languages would have led us to a different interpretation of
_Bache_. In Suevo-Gothic, _Backe_ is "an ascent or descent, extremitas
montes, alias crepido vel ora." Wachter has _Backe_; collis, tumulus; of
which _Bühel_, collis clivus, is the diminutive still in use. In Swedish
_Backe_, and in Danish _Bakke_, is a hill or rising ground; and Ray, in
his _Travels_, has "a _baich_, or languet of land." There has probably
been some confusion here, as well as in the two similar words _dune_ and
_dene_, for _hill_ and _valley_.